


The Five Senses, or: Five Places Brienne Remembers and One She Would Rather Forget

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon Compliant, Drabble Sequence, F/M, Gen, Memories, Senses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-07
Updated: 2013-11-07
Packaged: 2017-12-31 18:28:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1034970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brienne’s memories of the most important places in her life are circumscribed by her five senses. What is real, but what she can see, taste, touch, smell, hear – think, feel, hope, wish, know?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Five Senses, or: Five Places Brienne Remembers and One She Would Rather Forget

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through ADWD. I own nothing except the recipe to mix it all up.

**Tarth**

All everyone knows of Tarth is that it is famed for its blue waters and the strategic importance of its straits. But for her, it is _her_ island. It is sunlight on skin and her septa’s scolding about freckles and unladylike tans. It is the smell of fresh bread and the clang of good steel in the yard. It is the cool dampness of the crypt beneath Evenfall Hall. It is the bitterness of teasing and rejection, the solidity of her father’s brawny arms, the shifting taste of hope for coming days, sunlight dancing on the sea. It is home.

 

**Highgarden**

In her fondest moments, she remembers the hum of bees, the scent of apple blossom, but she knows this is wrong. Summer was nearly over when King Renly’s bannermen gathered under those white walls. Orchards were laden with apples, ripe for the picking, sweet with juice. She was neither sweet nor ripe, yet they almost picked her too. Those chattering monkeys, those false knights. Her tears tasted salt-bitter, but not as bitter as Lord Tarly’s words. Mockery and rejection, worse than before. Her hands bled with determination, yet she wept harder after the wedding. Among the many, she stood alone. 

 

**Bitterbridge to Storm’s End**

A cacophony of the senses: cookfires, dung, the drunken laughter of camp followers, the coarse voices of the men, the tender lullabies, the rutting, sparks thrown by whetstones on blades, blue skies and cloudy. The brief taste of triumph after the melee, like a tangerine, a small bolt of lightning in her mouth. She would wager the pleasure whores speak of is nothing compared to that taste, barely there before it grew flat on her tongue. Her moment, her Rainbow Cloak, the hands which fastened it, brushed her throat and shoulder. It was too dark to see in his tent. 

 

**Riverrun to the Kingsroad**

She still does not know what to make of it. At first there was anger, metallic like spilled blood. Words, his sharp as blades, hers heavy as cudgels. Then came fear, sawdust and maggots in her throat. The stench of rotting flesh between them, the feel of a man’s helplessness, limbs cold as clay, lax as linen. She cannot see clearly through the steam, through the thorny thicket of words. She can smell animal rankness, feel the presence of her death, huge and ravenous. She was on her knees, done. Shouldn’t have lived, but for a hand grasping hers, golden-bright. 

 

**Duskendale to the Quiet Isle**

Salt spray on her face, rain which tastes of burnt villages on her lips. She thirsts for certainty, for a true road to follow, but hers is a fool’s quest. The suspicion of futility is ice shards in her fists, sharp, gone. She does not trust her companions, she does not trust herself. Aloneness has never been so difficult. Even the shelter of the river island, its penitents like silent bees, is smoke and honey to her, choking, heart-heavy. The sword is the only light in the gathering darkness. She knows whom she wants with her on this vanishing road. 

 

 **Pennytree**

Everything since the inn is a monotony of fire and blood. The Targaryens are just history to her, yet truer words were never spoken. Her world distilled to cold days, mornings and nights of pain, the ghostly bonfire in a cave, the certainty of things worse than death. Promises, oaths like wind, dry leaves, sooty smoke. Kingslayer’s whore, the name a millstone, a severed hand around her neck. All may see her shame plain as a Summer day, so why can’t _he_ see it? She trudges through frozen mud to a crimson tent, and does not know what to do.

**Author's Note:**

> Many ingredients went into this stew:  
> -my love of drabbles and desire to write a proper 5+1 fic  
> -J/B with all their canon ambiguity and complexity  
> -my long-standing fascination with the ways our physical senses shape our perceptions, memories and identities (special nod to the beautiful Canadian film _The Five Senses_ , from which I filched the title)  
> -the sensory richness of Brienne’s chapters in AFFC, and how haunted she is by her past and her desires  
> -this quote from Qyburn in ASOS: “If we leave our smells behind us when we leave a room, surely something of our souls must remain when we leave this life.”


End file.
